Georgia, a cat owned by Becky Alfrey, likes to look down on 'silly' dogs playing

I once had a cat called Bones. My wife named him that and I could never undestand why, since Bones generally was better fed than me.

I like cats — even though my grandmother’s Siamese loved to ambush me with stinging nips to the hand — but I’ve always been more of a dog person.

My parents told me that when I was a baby I was virtually raised by a “Heinz 57 blend” dog named Fritz. They’d put me in a stoller in front of our apartment and Fritz would guard me from the local street toughs.

Anyway, I think Bones knew I was a dog guy and didn’t like it a bit. So he started relieving himself into a floor vent in our bedroom. Everything was peachy until the heat clicked on and filled the room with the most acrid odor.

Nurse Nancy sometimes gets a bit frazzled. You would be too if you tried to put a feline-size condom on a tomcat.

You know, there’s the sharp claws and teeth. The nurse might need a nurse by the time she’s done.

In real life, Nurse Nancy goes by the name of Amy Angelilli, and she’s the executive director of the Rocky Mountain Alley Cat Alliance, which operates The Feline Fix, a low-cost cat spaying and neutering clinic in Denver.

Angelilli appears in the comic role of the nurse in a series of online video clips. The tomcat condoms? They actually exist, but they’re just a humorous way of getting a serious message out.

The series of Nurse Nancy clips is now available via three social media outlets. The purpose is to spread the word about birth control for pets.

“We just felt that we needed something that was funny, but still got the point across that the only way to prevent unwanted pet pregnancies and help fight the pet overpopulation problem was through spaying and neutering,” says Angelilli.Read more…

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The Humane Society of Boulder Valley waived cat adoption fees on Sunday and as a result had the biggest adoption day in its history, placing 117 animals – including 97 felines – in new homes.

Every spring and summer, when felines are out and more active, newborn cats flood communities and turn up in droves at shelters, a phenomenon known as “kitten season”. This year, according to Dumb Friends League spokeswoman Sheri Tuffield, there have been more cats than kittens coming to her shelter some weeks.

The League has 800 cats in its care, the result of a 47 percent increase brought to the organization’s Denver and Douglas County shelters compared to this time last year.Read more…

A female pit bull, one of three put bulls involved involved in the mauling of a 10-year-old boy in 2005, is held at Aurora Animal Care.

Monika Courtney had something on her mind and she wanted me to know about it.

The Evergreen freelance writer and self-described “animal advocate” was upset about a headline she saw on a Denver television news story: “Pit bull attacks 6-year-old girl.”

Courtney didn’t deny the incident happened. But the outspoken opponent of legislation banning a specific breed of dog didn’t believe the breed would have been mentioned if it were something other than a pit bull — that’s if the story had even been done in the first place.

In short, she believed the media blew it. She’s not the first person I’ve encountered who feels that way. In fact, pit bull supporters in general seem to think the media has helped stereotype the breed as vicious and dangerous while failing to offer other views or context, such as whether or not the pit bull owner’s negligence is to blame for an attack.

So I asked Courtney to explain why she felt that way. Here, in her own words, edited for space, is what she e-mailed me:

Doug Koktavy, a Denver area attorney, thought he could control life’s problems with the right plan and hard work.

His two black Labrador retrievers, Beezer and Boomer, taught him lessons he’ll never forget.

The dogs, adopted as litter-mates, died about two years apart – Beezer first, of kidney disease, then Boomer of bone cancer.

Koktavy, divorced after adopting the dogs, dealt alone with the final days of the pair, whom he regarded as his canine brothers. And he did it while running a successful home-based practice.

When Beezer was sick, Koltavy relentlessly searched for solutions but found few. He obsessed about losing his best friend and felt guilty that he somehow wasn’t doing enough.

Beezer, however, continued to enjoy every moment he had left with his human pal, taking pleasure in even the smallest of things.

When Boomer got sick two years after his sibling died, Koktavy had learned to spend more time “in the moment.” Every day became the pursuit of one adventure, one time of having fun while they could still do it together.

Koktavy now knows that, at the begiinning of his ordeal, he was suffering from something called “anticipatory grief.” It was the kind of grief that robbed you of today while you feared tomorrow.

Gradually, with the help of his dogs, he says he learned that “fear lives in the future, guilt lives in the past (and) nothing bad ever happens in the present.”

This is no cute-dog story, nor is it a “doggoir”. It is a remembrance full of pain and joy. It is likely to make readers cry and smile.

Most importantly, it is a roadmap of how one man learned to deal with the fact that his closest friends were dying, how to share their final days with peace and dignity and to build as many good memories with them as their remaining time would allow.

He is donating a portion of book sales to animal welfare groups.

“There are many books about grief of a scholarly nature,” Koktavy said in a recent interview. “But this is my story about what I went through.”

And what he went through was a transforming experience, Koktavy says.

“As legal Doug, I live in truth. I’m in control. But that offered little help when my dogs were dying,” he said. “I got pretty good at sharing communication with my dogs. I could look in their eyes and began to hear them in my heart. I learned to trust that.”

Has he run into skeptism from those who don’t believe in such human/animal communication?

“There’s all kinds of things with animals we can’t explain,” Koktavy answered. “When the Asian tsunami was happening, people ran to the ocean to see it going backwards. The animals headed to higher ground.”

He also cites the case of Oscar, a cat that seems to have a knack for predicting when patients in a Providence, R.I., nursing home are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

“Why couldn’t somebody have a talent for communicating with animals?” he asks. “When you get into things you can’t prove, the skeptics really go to town.”

Koktavy said he has been “really blessed” to have his book win awards “in different areas, which shows how unusal the book is.”

The book has been honored by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association, Eric Hoffer Book Awards and Next Generation Indie Book Awards, among others.

Part of the proceeds from the book, which will soon be available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, will go to non-profit animal welfare organizations as part of a program Koktavy calls the B Brothers Project. For information: www.BeezerAndBoomer.com.

PET CALENDAR

For the greyhounds – Friends of Retired Greyhounds, a non-profit, volunteer-run organization, will hold its first annual 3K, charity dog walk, Dogs in the Park, at E.B. Rains Jr. Memorial Park in Northglenn on Sunday, June 27, at 10 a.m. Funds raised will help place retired greyhounds into responsible homes. Contact: Friendsofretiredgreyhounds.org.

Birthday bargain – Rocky Mountain Alley Cat Alliance (RMACA), celebrates the first birthday of The Feline Fix – a high volume spay/neuter cat clinic – all summer through a “Beat the Heat” campaign. Cat guardians will receive $5 off surgery ($35 for tame cats; $20 for feral cats) if they mention “Beat the Heat” when making their reservation. Reservations can be made via phone at 303.202.3516 or via email at reservations@rmaca.org.

American Humane Animal-Assisted Therapy handler, Paula Coy, with her dog Sambo, introduce themselves to Kyle Cozard, an 8-year-old with autism during a meet-and-greet last week at the American Humane Association in Englewood. Coy and Cozard will walk together during Colorado Walk Now for Autism Speaks on April 24 at Dick's Sporting Good Park.

A recent survey shows that most dog owners polled believe they can communicate with canines better than their human friends.

No big surprise here.

Dogs are probably the most accommodating animals in the world. Friends? Just try to get a buddy to fetch your slippers.

According to the survey, done by Kelton Research for the dog snack Pup-Peroni, 74 percent of dog owners surveyed said their canine’s body language or facial expressions let them know how their pet is feeling.

Seventy percent believe they have “shared a look” with Fido.

Nearly half are convinced they know exactly what their pet is thinking and more than a third say they’ve had an entire conversation with their hounds without saying anything.

“We have seen a significant increase of that in Wyoming. It’s disturbing,” he told the reporter who wrote the story.

Poachers run down deer with cars or snowmobiles, and chase raccoons, then beat them to death with clubs. They also shoot deer, elk and antelope, sometimes removing valuable antlers but often leaving the carcass to rot on the ground, Talbott and other wildlife officials said.

The number of poachers ignoring wildlife laws is also on the rise across Colorado, according to the Colorado Division of Wildlife. Officers write about 2,150 tickets a year to hunters; 200 are for serious poaching crimes such as thrill-killing.

The four-year-old black Labrador was thought to be the heaviest dog in Scotland at 64kg (141 pounds).

Bob’s owner just couldn’t resist over-feeding him a diet of fish suppers and four tins of dog food a day.

That was enough for the authorities, according to a story on the British Broadcasting Corporation website. Bob was confiscated, put on a strict diet and placed in a new home.

Bob has since shed a third of his body weight. His previous owner was convicted of causing unnecessary suffering by over-feeding him, making him lighter in the wallet.

So all’s well that ends well? Not so fast.

While Bob’s case might br extreme, it’s not unusual. Some 44 percent of dogs and 57 percent of cats in America are overweight, according to the 2008 National Pet Obesity Awareness Study. (No figures were available for Scotch hounds.)

Some animal workers are calling pet obesity an epidemic. A local expert, Dr. Paige Garnett of Care Animal Hospital in Aurora, doesn’t go quite that far. She says things haven’t changed much in the past decade.

Garnett taught a weight-management class to fellow doctors several years ago and put together a program that animal clinics can use.

“Overweight animal statistics are similar to humans,’ Garnett said last week “About 50 percent of the dogs and cats we see at my clinic are overweight.”

“It’s a big problem,” she allowed. ” You throw dog food in a bowl and think, ‘That’s not very much.’ But we’re seeing a lot of overweight pets.”

Lack of exercise is a concern, Garnett said, but the big issue is cutting down calories.

“A large dog biscuit has as many calories as a Snickers bar,” she said.

The long-term effects of obesity are serious, Garnett added. For dogs, they include torn knee ligaments, diabetes and heart trouble. For cats, they include diabetes, heart and liver disease.

She said mixing green beans or air-popped popcorn with pet food is one strategy to reduce calories, as is giving animals baby carrots rather than pet snacks.

Garnett works with clients at her clinic to come up with a plan tailored to them.

She’s seeking two outcomes:

* To be able to feel the pet’s ribs while not seeing them.

* To be able to see a pet’s waistline.

It takes continous effort to keep an animal trim. Some of them won’t quit eating until every scrap is gone. As a way of stressing this, Garnett tells a little joke on herself.

“My dog, a border collie, gained 15 pounds after being spayed,” she said. “Everybody in the clinic was giving me a bad time.”

* * *

Scientists have uncovered the first-known example of human bacteria infecting an animal species, according to a recent article in The Times of London.

Researchers at Edinburgh University have traced a serious infection in poultry back to a single human-to-animal jump. It occurred about 38 years ago, possibly in the region of Poland.

The process is the first to be discovered in the 10,000 years since animals were domesticated, The Times said.

Staphylococcus aureus, a subtype of MRSA, is now endemic in chickens. It is a leading cause of bone and joint infections, which makes them lame and in turn leads to them being culled, and is a serious economic burden to the industry, according to the article.

S. aureus, which lives in the human nose, probably jumped from its human handler while he or she was handling a chicken. Changing agricultural practices meant that the bacteria then spread through the chicken population, the Times said.

It is not believed it can transmit back to humans.

* * *

An emergency team from the Englewood-based American Humane Association has been in Tennessee caring for animals during an investigation of alleged animal abuse and cruelty at the City of Memphis Animal Shelter. The team’s help was requested by the Shelby County District Attorney.

According to the warrant that was served last week, “Detectives have learned that some animals have been deprived of food and water while at the Memphis Animal Shelter,” and while in the shelter’s care, “…some dogs have been starved to the point of requiring euthanasia.”

In addition, the warrant reported unsanitary conditions, overcrowding, and vicious and sick animals being housed along with other pets.

For the cats – Rocky Mountain Alley Cat Alliance hosts a jewelry shopping party and bake sale to benefit The Feline Fix – its new spay/neuter cat clinic — on Saturday, Nov. 21 from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. Guests will enjoy refreshments as well as baked goods for their Thanksgiving dinners and handmade jewelry for the ladies on their holiday shopping list. This holiday event will be held at the Whittier Neighborhood Association Community Center at 2900 Downing Street in Denver – across the street from the light rail. Contact: Info@RMACA.org.

Fetch takes a topical look at a variety of issues affecting pets, including the latest research results.. It seeks to provide useful information for Colorado pet owners and to spotlight the work of Colorado animal welfare groups.